Aggression

Aggression, in international relations, an act or policy of expansion carried out by one state at the expense of another by means of an unprovoked military attack. For purposes of reparation or punishment after hostilities, aggression has been defined in international law as any use of armed force in international relations not justified by defensive necessity, international authority, or consent of the state in which force is used. Numerous treaties and official declarations since World War I, including the Covenant of the League of Nations (article 10) and the Charter of the United Nations (article 39), have sought to prohibit acts of aggression to ensure collective security among nations. Since World War I the acceptance by most states of obligations to refrain from the use of force has often made it necessary for international forums to consider the problem of aggression in hostilities that have occurred. In such cases the League of Nations and the United Nations have usually followed the procedure of ordering a cease-fire and have considered a government an aggressor only if it failed to observe that order.

Such cease-fire orders marked the ending of hostilities between Turkey and Iraq in 1925, between Greece and Bulgaria in 1925, between Peru and Colombia in 1933, between Greece and its neighbours in 1947, between the Netherlands and Indonesia in 1947, between India and Pakistan in 1948, between Israel and its neighbours in 1949, between Israel, Great Britain, France, and Egypt in 1956, and between Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in 1970. None of these states was at the time declared an aggressor. On the other hand, Japan was found to be an aggressor in Manchuria in 1933, Paraguay in the Chaco area in 1935, North Korea and mainland China in Korea in 1950 and 1951, and the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956, because they refused to observe cease-fire orders.

Other instances of military intervention have been widely considered aggression by opponents although not pronounced such by an international forum. These include the U.S.-supported Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, U.S. military intervention in the Dominican Republic in 1965, U.S. actions in Vietnam, North Vietnamese actions in South Vietnam and elsewhere in Indochina, and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by the Soviet Union and its eastern European allies.